Who’d want to be English?
Tom Shippey, 4 January 2024
Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 977 pp., £35, August,978 0 571 27457 4 Show More
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 977 pp., £35, August,
“... from Philip IV, also in the female line, but now in the third generation. While the argument may have been relevant in the 1320s, when Philip IV’s last son died, it was meaningless by 1453, after more than a hundred years of war. By then it was obvious that no matter his heredity, a king of England couldn’t be king of France, precisely because he was ... ”